Monday Past

I did a guest blog on Katherine Roberts' Reclusive Muse last week - come and see me there ...

And this week I'm off to Clovenstone Primary School with Johnny Meres and Kathryn Ross for Haiku or a Hundred Words, Part 2.

So all good stuff.

First Lines

Listen to this ...

Aslina o gun hava gayet kotu olabilirdi. Mesela karanlik ve yagmurlu olabilirdi ve dogudan esen korkunc ruzgarda catiya cikmayi dusunmek bile cok tehlikeli olurdu. Ama hava kotu degildi.*

Or perhaps ...

La journee aurait tres bien pu etre epouvantable: grise, humide, avec un mechant vent d'est qui aurait ecarte definitivement toute tentative perilleuse de grimper sur le toit. Mais il n'en etait rien.**

Or even ...

It could just as easily have been a horrible day - grey and wet with a nasty east wind, so that climbing onto the roof was much too dangerous to even consider. But it wasn't.

The arrival this week of the Turkish translation of the first 2 Wickit Chronicles has had me excitedly mangling yet another new language to myself, using the first lines of Ely Plot as my Rosetta Stone. Because I know that sometime, somewhere, my life may very well depend on my ability to say "nasty east wind" in as many languages as possible.

Be my guest - have a go!


* Except that my keyboard doesn't do loads of the letters right.
** Or accents.

Mystery Beach

Name that beach and win a fabulous prize. Or at the very least, a sense of personal satisfaction ...

I'm on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure this weekend - visit me there!

Cheers, Joan.

Prolific Cows in May

The Haiku or a Hundred Words project takes off this month, with Clovenstone Primary School, at the Edinburgh Zoo. (Hence the zoo pictures - I had a thoroughly enjoyable recce this weekend - now if only we can have as good weather ...) There will be more anon about this.

Girls Heart Books is up and running, and my first post is scheduled for Monday 9th May - go have a look see!

My next An Awfully Big Blog Adventure slot comes up on Sat. 14th May.

And I'm doing a guest Muse Monday blog on Katherine Roberts' site on the 23rd May which is, er, a Monday.

You may not know this, but, according to my rather ancient Brewers' Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, "The Anglo-Saxons called this month [i.e. May] thrilmilce, because then cows can be milked three times a day ..." Works for me.

Miss Marple for the 9-12's?

Stumbled across a nice surprise this morning - in the Spring issue of Carousel (a magazine about children's books produced in association with the Federation of Children's Book Groups) there was an article titled:

Whodunnits? Crime Stories and How to Solve Them ... Find a Book That You Like!

It was by David Blanch and he included The Case of the London Dragonfish, cover and all. (Not only that, he said nice things about it, which is why I'm blogging away happily here.) One of the things he noticed in his survey of current children's detective books was that "the majority had a female main character ... Interesting? Were all these writers influenced by Miss Marple or do they want to appeal to a female readership?"

Recently I've had to think about this because I'm taking part in a new blog called Girls Heart Books - launched today! Does Slightly belong in a blog like this, I wondered at first? I was afraid she wasn't, well, pink enough. But then I thought, why shouldn't she be there! Have a look and see what you think - the site looks fabulous. (My first posting date is 9th May.)

Did I write Slightly as a girl because I was aiming at a girl readership? Or because I'm a Miss Marple fan? Well, no. I'm not that in control. I wrote Slightly as a girl because she IS a girl. And is she likely to grow up to be Miss Marple in, say, 50 or 60 years? Why ever not!